Can we delete words from Flare's own dictionary?

[techwriterkai]

Is there a way to delete a word from Flare's own dictionary?

There are a couple of words we don't want any writer to use, ever, regardless of how correctly they may be spelled! At least, we want is a red squiggly line underneath the words to remind writers that they shouldn't use it.

Any ideas how to do this? Thanks in advance!

[Msquared]

Well. I can tell you where Flare's internal dictionary files are, and how to open them. You could try hacking them to remove the words you object to, and putting them back together. I think it's likely to work. But if you do this, be aware that your hacks may be overwritten for new releases of Flare (or may not) and you may have to do it all again.

They are here: C:\Program Files (x86)\MadCap Software\MadCap Flare V9\Flare.app\Resources\HunspellDict

They are .oxt files, which are just zip files under another name. So choose the file for the language group you want to hack, copy it, rename the file to .zip, then unzip with your favourite zip utility.

Once inside the zip archive, you'll find various files, for example en_GB.dic is the UK English one (unzipped from dict-en.oxt). That's just a text file full of words, so find the words you object to, remove them, and zip the files up again. Finally, rename to the .oxt extension and put it back where you found it.

Let me know how you get on. It's always useful to know how to get round things.

This is actually an Open Office file extension, so it's not a proprietary MadCap format.

[Msquared]

Did you get to try this and did it work?

[clxmichelle]

I tried and couldn't get it. There's a lot of files and I could have unzipped the wrong one, but it seemed like the best option. Once unzipped, there are again a ton of files. Tried the best option I could suss out, but couldn't find the word I wanted to remove. I also tried searching in the folder in case I had the wrong TXT, but that didn't find it either. Sigh.